Cover not available
Article published In:
The Structure of the English NP: Synchronic and diachronic explorations
Edited by Kristin Davidse
[Functions of Language 23:1] 2016
► pp. 60–83

From nominal to verbal gerunds

A referential typology

 | University of Leuven
This paper provides a detailed comparison of the referential behaviour of noun phrases and nominal and verbal gerunds from Middle to Late Modern English. It will be shown that in earlier stages of English, nominal and verbal gerunds to a large extent resemble prototypical noun phrases in their referential functioning, but also exhibit ‘non-nominal’ uses that depend on clausal rather than nominal grounding strategies. It is argued that the study of (diachronic changes in) the semantic and functional behaviour of nominal and verbal gerunds in Middle and Modern English should take into account that these are functionally hybrid constructions, showing referential traits of both prototypical noun phrases and clauses. This functional hybridity, then, was gradually sorted out, with nominal gerunds specializing to nominal reference and verbal gerunds continuing to adhere to the functional apparatus associated with subordinate clauses.
Published online: 16 June 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.23.1.04fon
References (68)
CLMET3.0 = The Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, version 3.0 (CLMET3.0). For details, see Diller et al. (2011).
PPCME = Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, 2nd ed. For details, see Kroch & Taylor (2000).
PPCEME = Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English. For details, see Kroch et al. (2004).
PPCMBE = Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English. For details, see Kroch et al. (2010).
Ackles, Nancy. 1997. Historical syntax of the English articles in relation to the count/non-count distinction. Seattle, WA: University of Washington PhD thesis.Google Scholar
Barker, Chris. 2005. Possessive weak definites. In Ji-yung Kim, Yury Lander & Barbara H. Partee (eds.), Possessives and beyond: Semantics and syntax, 89–113. Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications.Google Scholar
Behrens, Leila. 2005. Genericity from a cross-linguistic perspective. Linguistics 43(2). 275–344. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bhat, D.N. Shankara. 1994. The adjectival category. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brinton, Laurel. 1998. Aspectuality and countability: A cross-categorial analogy. English Language and Linguistics 2(1). 37–63. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davidse, Kristin. 1999. The semantics of cardinal versus enumerative existential constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 10(3). 203–250.Google Scholar
De Smet, Hendrik. 2008. Functional motivations in the development of nominal and verbal gerunds in Middle and Early Modern English. English Language and Linguistics 121. 55–102. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2013. Spreading patterns: Diffusional change in the English system of complementation. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Diller, Hans-Jürgen, Hendrik De Smet & Jukka Tyrkkö. 2011. A European database of descriptors of English electronic texts. The European English Messenger 191. 21–35.Google Scholar
Donner, Morton. 1986. The gerund in Middle English. English Studies 67(5). 394–400. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, John W. 1980. Beyond definiteness: The trace of identity in discourse. In Wallace Chafe (ed.), The pear stories: Cognitive, cultural and linguistic aspects of narrative production, 203–274. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Duffley, Patrick. 2014. Reclaiming control as a semantic and pragmatic phenomenon. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Emonds, Joseph E. 1973. The derived nominals, gerunds, and participles in Chaucer’s English. In Braj B. Kachru & Robert B. Lees (eds.), Issues in linguistics: Papers in honor of Henry and Renée Kahane, 185–189. Urbana, Il.: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Fanego, Teresa. 1996a. The development of gerunds as objects of subject-control verbs in English. Diachronica 13(1). 29–62. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1996b. On the historical development of English retrospective verbs. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 97(1). 71–79.Google Scholar
. 1998. Developments in argument linking in early Modern English gerund phrases. English Language and Linguistics 2(1). 87–119. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2006. The role of language standardization in the loss of hybrid gerunds in Modern English. In Leiv Egil Breivik, Sandra Halverson & Kari Haugland (eds.), ‘These things write I vnto thee...’: Essays in honour of Bjorg Bækken, 93–110. Oslo: Novus Press.Google Scholar
. 2007. Drift and the development of sentential complements in British and American English from 1700 to the present day. In Javier Pérez-Guerra, Dolores González-Álvarez, Jorge L. Bueno-Alonso & Esperanza Rama-Martínez (eds.), ‘Of varying language and opposing creed’: New insights into Late Modern English, 161–235. Bern: Lang.Google Scholar
Fauconnier, Gilles. 1985. Mental spaces: Aspects of meaning construction in natural language. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Fischer, Olga. 1992. Syntactic change and borrowing: The case of the accusative-and-infinitive construction in English. In Marinel Gerritsen & Dieter Stein (eds.), Internal and external factors in syntactic change, 17–89. Berlin: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fonteyn, Lauren, Hendrik De Smet & Liesbet Heyvaert. 2015a. What it means to verbalize: The changing discourse functions of the English gerund. Journal of English Linguistics 43(1). 36–60. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fonteyn, Lauren, Liesbet Heyvaert & Charlotte Maekelberghe. 2015b. How do gerunds conceptualize events? A diachronic study. Cognitive Linguistics 26(4). 583–612. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Givón, Talmy. 1990. Syntax: A functional-typological introduction. Vol. II1. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Halliday, Michael A.K. 1985. An introduction to functional grammar. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. 1997. Indefinite pronouns. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 1978. Definiteness and indefiniteness: A study in reference and grammaticality prediction. London: Helm.Google Scholar
Heyvaert, Liesbet. 2008. On the constructional semantics of gerundive nominalizations. Folia Linguistica 42(1). 39–82. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hopper, Paul J. & Sandra A. Thompson. 1985. The iconicity of the universal categories ‘noun’ and ‘verb’. In John Haiman (ed.), Iconicity in Syntax, 151–186. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Houston, Ann. 1989. The English gerund: Syntactic change and discourse function. In Ralph W. Fasold & Deborah Schiffrin (eds.), Language change and variation, 173–196. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jack, George B. 1988. The origins of the English gerund. Nowele 121. 15–75. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jespersen, Otto. 1940. A Modern English grammar on historical principles. Vol. 51. London: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Kranich, Svenja. 2006. The origin of English gerundial constructions: A case of French influence?. In Andrew J. Johnston, Ferdinand von Mengden & Stefan Thim (eds.), Language and text: Current perspectives on English and German historical linguistics and philology, 179–195. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony & Ann Taylor. 2000. Penn-Helsinki parsed corpus of middle English, 2nd ed. [URL].Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony, Beatrice Santorini & Lauren Delfs. 2004. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English. [URL].Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony, Beatrice Santorini & Ariel Diertani. 2010. Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English. [URL].Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W. 1991. Foundations of cognitive grammar. Vol. 21. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
. 2009. Investigations in cognitive grammar. Berlin: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lyons, John. 1999. Definiteness. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Maekelberghe, Charlotte & Liesbet Heyvaert. Forthcoming. Indefinite nominal gerunds, or the particularization of a reified event. English Studies.
Malchukov, Andrej L. 2004. Nominalization, verbalization: Constraining a typology of transcategorial operations. Munich: Lincom Europa.Google Scholar
. 2006. Constraining nominalization: function/form competition. Linguistics 44(5). 973–1009. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mari, Alda, Claire Beyssade & Fabio Del Prete. 2013. Genericity. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Martin, James Robert. 1992. English Text: System and Structure. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Miller, Gary D. 2002. Nonfinite structures in theory and change. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Mustanoja, Tauno Frans. 1960. A Middle English syntax. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.Google Scholar
Postal, Paul Martin. 1970. On coreferential complement subject deletion. Linguistic Inquiry 1(4). 439–500.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen F. 1992. The ZPG letter subjects: Definiteness and information status. In Sandra Thompson & William Mann (eds.), Discourse description diverse analyses of a fundraising text, 295–325. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Quine, Willard V.O. 1960. Word and object. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph S., Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena. 1991. The noun phrase in early sixteenth-century English: A study based on Sir Thomas Moore’s writing. Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki 50. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.Google Scholar
Rissanen, Matti. 1999. Syntax. In Roger Lass (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, Vol. III, Early Modern English 1476–1776, 187–331. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Schachter, Paul. 1976. A nontransformational account of gerundive nominals in English. Linguistic Inquiry 7(2). 205–241.Google Scholar
Sommerer, Lotte. 2011. Old English se from demonstrative to article: A usage-based study of nominal determination and category emergence. Vienna: University of Vienna PhD thesis.Google Scholar
. 2012. Investigating article development in Old English: About categorization, gradualness and constructions. Folia Linguistica Historica 331. 175–213.Google Scholar
Tabor, Whitney & Elisabeth Closs Traugott, 1998. Structural scope expansion and grammaticalization. In Anna Giacolone Ramat & Paul John Hopper (eds.), The limits of grammaticalization, 229–272. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tajima, Matsuji. 1999. The compound gerund in Early Modern English. In Sheila Embleton, John E. Joseph & Hans-Josef Niederehe (eds.), The emergence of the modern language sciences: Studies on the transition from historical-comparative to structural linguistics in honour of E. F. K. Koerner, 265–276. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van de Velde, Freek. 2010. The emergence of the determiner in the Dutch NP. Linguistics 48(2). 263–299. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Visser, Frederick Theodor. 1963–1973. An historical syntax of the English language. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Von Heusinger, Klaus. 2002. Specificity and definiteness in sentence and discourse structure. Jounral of Semantics 191. 245–274. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Willemse, Peter. 2005. Nominal reference-point constructions: Possessive and esphoric NPs in English. Leuven: University of Leuven PhD thesis.Google Scholar
Wurff, van der Wim. 1993. Gerunds and their objects in the Modern English period. In Jaap Van Marle (ed.), Historical linguistics 1991, 363–375. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (8)

Cited by eight other publications

Ellisa Indriyani Putri Handayani & Agus Hari Wibowo
2024. Syntax Acquisition in Children: Developmental Patterns and Cognitive Processes. Jurnal Onoma: Pendidikan, Bahasa, dan Sastra 10:4 ► pp. 3926 ff. DOI logo
van Praet, Wout
2023. Referential accessibility as an index of the discourse functions of predicative and specificational clauses. Text & Talk 43:1 ► pp. 113 ff. DOI logo
He, Qingshun
2020. A Corpus-based Study of Transfers in English Gerunds. In Corpus-based Approaches to Grammar, Media and Health Discourses [The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series, ], ► pp. 17 ff. DOI logo
Mackenzie, J. Lachlan
2019. Is there a pluralia tantum subcategory of nominal gerunds? Developing Gaeta's notion of morphological differentiation. Language Sciences 73 ► pp. 179 ff. DOI logo
Sommerer, Lotte
2019. Van Goethem, Kristel, Muriel Norde, Evie Coussé & Gudrun Vanderbauwhede (eds.). (2018).Category Change from a Constructional Perspective. Constructions and Frames 11:2 ► pp. 317 ff. DOI logo
Fonteyn, Lauren & Liesbet Heyvaert
2018. Chapter 6. Category change in the English gerund. In Category Change from a Constructional Perspective [Constructional Approaches to Language, 20], ► pp. 149 ff. DOI logo
Fonteyn, Lauren & Charlotte Maekelberghe
2018. Competing motivations in the diachronic nominalization of English gerunds. Diachronica 35:4 ► pp. 487 ff. DOI logo
Maekelberghe, Charlotte
2018. Present-day English gerunds: A multilayered referential model. Folia Linguistica 52:1 ► pp. 39 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.